34 unhappy. The remittance man, ac- cording to my mother, was "very cold." She said, "Pa didn't under- stand. The man came from a warm country. He was desperately cold." My saintly grandmother visited- furtively, my mother managed to im- ply-with blankets and hot soup. She provided these also for the local poor. Quite what happened to the remittance man I am unable to ascertain. As a lit- tle girl, I thought the word "re- mittance" meant that he was somehow provisional and not to be considered. Perhaps he went home, to the hot sun and the gold mines and his life before the incursion of my tragic aunt. I have since given him, in my imagination, the features of a South African novelist I know-thoughtful, consid- erate, secretive, withdrawn. When I was little, I saw him as a Gilded Youth in a boater. When I was only just born, Sylvia killed both herself and her small daughter. I know this because I inherited certain toys belonging to this destroyed cousin. There was a dog-a nightdress case-zipped, furry, black and white, and peaceably couchant, whom I loved for years before I dis- covered his provenance. And after. I remember shouting with terrible cour- age, when some clearance of outgrown toys was proposed, "You can't throw W ops away. He was Sylvia's." Know- ing I did not know what this sentence meant to them, using it to save my dog, shamed. "Your fathe.r smoked terribly for two years after Sylvia died," my mother said once. This at least explained why he, who never smoked, owned a chased-silver ciga- rette case. I could not imagine his feelings. My mother had reduced her accounts of Sylvia to various manage- able dicta. Sylvia, she gave the impres- sion, was the most gifted of the gifted gaggle. She could have done all sorts of things, my mother said, and always added, "It was like putting a racehorse to draw a milk cart." She said also, scornfully, "She was no housewife, she had no idea." I imagined a hutlike house, stone-floored, coal-fired, with barely room to turn round in. There must, however, have been a gas oven. I think I took Sylvia's fate as a warning against both brilliance and sexual passion. My father used to be partly amused, but ultimately more alarmed, by any evidence of extrava- gant passions in his daughters. He was a romantically-minded man, and be- lieved that the first lover is al ways the most important. He was a virtuous man, and was, it seems clear , steadfastly faith- ful to my mother. In Amsterdam, he spoke of his brother Arthur with a kind of mild envy. He felt he him- self had always been too cautious. "When I come before my Maker," he said as he sipped the glass of wine that the doctors, despairing of cure, had permi tted him, "which I do not expect will happen, I shall have to beg him to forgive me my virtues." My mother said he had learned from the others' disasters, he had learned to be careful and to value security and domestic peace. My mother's accounts of my grand- mother's selflessness were like pearls, or sugarcoated pills, grit and bitterness polished into roundness by comedy and my mother's worked-upon under- standing of my grandmother's real meaning. While I cannot remember any quoted instance of my grandfa- ther's speech, I can remember various sayings of my grandmother, including her welcome of my infant self, on my first visit. There she stood on the doorstep, my mother said, rigid and doubtful-I imagine it for some rea- son taking place on a snowy evening, in the early dark. She did not say "How lovely to see you" or "Let me see the baby" or "Come in and get warm" but "It hardly seems worth the trouble of all that pacKing just to come here. Babies are always best in their own house, I think." My mother would always add a long explanation of this ungraciousness: my grand- mother was genuinely self-deprecat- ing, she was very well aware of the real trouble of transporting a baby with all her equipment, she was thank- ing my mother for having made the effort. The grit inside the pearly sug- arcoating was a fear of rejection by both women, perhaps. "I nearly just turned round and went home," my mother always said, and always added, "But it was just her manner; she meant very well, really." /'" And "She was really very fond of me, she came to see me as a daughter, I was a favorite." The famous teapot story is another such instance. It took place, I think, in the war, during petrol rationing. My grandmother was driven over by the chauffeur from Conisbrough to Ponte- fract to take tea with my mother and to see a new grandchild. She sat briefly, talking to my mother. But when offered tea she stood up abruptly and said no, no, thank you, she had stayed too long, she must get back to pour my grandfather's tea for him, he expected it. My mother's empha- sis in this story was on the childish helplessness of my grandfather, who, with a houseful of servants, could not stretch out a hand and lift his own teapot. My grandmother's formIdable manner and her excessive dutifulness were part of each other, in my moth- er's vision-a kind of folly of decorum in which the result was the rejection of my mother's carefully prepared tea and cakes. "All that way, and the petrol, and the chauffeur's time, wast- ed just to pour his cup of tea," my mother would say scornfully and yet with fear. This story runs into the story of my grandmother's death. Even in her last illness, my mother would say, when the old woman was weak and in great pain, my grandfather would not allow her to sleep alone in a spare bedroom. She gave the impression, my mother, of the elderly man howling like a lost